Flashback Monday: Flowers For Restonians

Our fondness for stylized architectural renderings and the Potemkin people drawn in for verisimilitude is well-documented, but this rendering of what one of the storefronts at Lake Anne Plaza might have looked like may be among the earliest glimpses of an idealized Reston that didn't quite come to fruition.

We like how this mockup flower store, creatively named "Flowers," has a sort of stained-glass-and-tile fern bar feel that would have stood out like a sore thumb among the Plaza's brutalist architecture. And there's no way the DRB would have permitted that gaudy light show (we envision a Vegas-like series of chasing lights to draw in would-be flower aficionados). It is nice to see, though, that the designers had envisioned the kitsch on the wall that would be used to such great effect by the pharmacy, even if it wound up raising the ire of fancypants scholars, the end.